The major objectives of this workshop are to sharpen the focus of ILRI's ecoregional research, to further identify commonalities in tools and new methods that can enable ILRI to do effective transregional research, and to identify improvements to the way in which ILRI does ecoregional research.

There are diverse opinions as to what an ecoregional research approach should involve. Ecoregional research is meant to fill gaps in natural resources management research, rationalise overlapping mandates, provide focal points and streamline interactions between NARS (National Agricultural Research Systems) and CGIAR (Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research) centres. This paper describes the institutional structure and technical operation of the proposed ecoregional programme in sub-humid West Africa.

Using the farm as unit of analysis, diagnosis processes aimed at improving production systems are reviewed. Within a country, diagnosis should be conducted at different hierarchical levels: local (interaction between the production system and the input distribution sector, the marketing sector, possible forms of processing, and consumption characteristics); regional (appropriate selection of target site); and national (development trends and governmental policies at the macroeconomic and sectorial levels).

As the only international centre that is solely concerned with African livestock, ILCA has a responsibility to play a lead role in defining the agenda of research issues related to livestock development and environmental policy in Africa. This paper presents a framework appropriate for defining that agenda and for guiding analysis of particular research issues and gives some detail on how ILCA might approach the specific area of range management policy in the arid and semi-arid areas.

Since September 1993, ILCA and IFPRI have been engaged in a discussion about the most important, researchable, issues in the area of property rights. A concept note has been developed for collaborative research on the evolution of resource use and property institutions under risk. The starting point or framework was the Boserup, McIntire (and others) model of gradual intensification. This model has been used in documents such as the Winrock Assessment of Animal Agriculture to predict paths of future development and recommend research to facilitate that development.